Stroke can cause disability and death. Timely treatment of stroke can save lives and reduce damages suffered by the patients. Stroke related diagnosis and treatment planning are made at least in part based on the medical images of the patient, such as computerized tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MR) images. Conventionally, these images are visually inspected by a medical personnel for diagnosis and treatment of stroke. Typically, multiple images need to be inspected and analyzed, which include brain images that depicting, respectively, anatomy, angiography, diffusion, perfusion, and the like.
There are some drawbacks associated with the conventional approaches to image-based stroke diagnosis and treatment planning. One problem is that human judgment can vary dependent on several factors such as perception, experience, fatigue, bias, and background noise, and thus can be inconsistent and inaccurate. As the number of images needs to be viewed increases, the difficulty of arriving at a correct diagnosis may also increase. Further, inspecting and analyzing multiple images can be time consuming. It is estimated that during a stroke about 1.9 million nerve cells die each minute and the ischemic brain ages about 3.9 years each hour. In this sense, it is said that “time is brain”. Therefore, it is desirable that a proper stroke treatment can be determined and implemented as soon as possible after a stroke has occurred.